Book Beginnings is a weekly meme hosted by Rose City Reader that asks you to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you're reading.
Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making.
Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Nelson binds her personal experience to a rigorous exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and child-rearing. Nelson's insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry of this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.
Book Beginnings: October, 2007. The Santa Ana winds are shredding the bark off the eucalyptus tress in long white stripes. A friend and I risk the widowmakers by having lunch outside, during which she suggests I tattoo the words HARD TO GET across my knuckles, as a reminder of this pose's possible fruits.
The Friday 56: I am not interested in the hermeneutics, or an erotics, or a metaphorics, of my anus.
What are you reading this week? Have you read this book? What beginnings make you interested in continuing a book?
Interesting but not for me. I hope you enjoy it. This week I am featuring Burn Bright by Patricia Briggs - a new one by a favorite author. Happy reading!
ReplyDeleteYeah, it definitely isn't quite what I expected. Thanks for stopping by!
DeleteI'm not sure this is my kind of book, but I hope you enjoy it. Happy reading.
ReplyDeleteLauren @ Always Me
It's a lot more bizarre than I had been told. So we'll see how I feel about it in the end! Thanks for stopping by!
DeleteThis is one I'd like to read! Just because of the film. Happy weekend!
ReplyDeleteThere's a film?! Good to know - I'll have to check it out.
DeleteI think I'd have to be in the right mood before I could enjoy this book. It sounds serious, and I read for escape and fun!
ReplyDeleteMy Friday post features Mrs. Pollifax Mysteries.
Ha agreed! I definitely wasn't fully aware of what I was getting myself into. Thanks for stopping by!
DeleteI just snorted after reading that 56. Hoping you've been enjoying this one!
ReplyDeleteIt was definitely intriguing! Thanks for stopping by!
DeleteOh my. That sentence feels so out of context that I want the rest of the paragraph. Phew. The character sounds like an interesting one just based on that sentence!
ReplyDeleteIt's a really interesting book that is mostly about motherhood, but had a few random pages about butts so....yeah.
Delete